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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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Young Prudes: Are sex norms mostly a manifestation of sex ratios?

Aria Shrecker of Works in Progress puts forward an interesting hypothesis. What if the sexual revolution of the 1960s was driven not (primarily) by the pill, but by a growing population?

The thesis rests on a few key points:

  1. Women prefer to marry slightly older men, and men slightly younger women
  2. With a growing population, there are more young women competing for a smaller pool of slightly older men. In a shrinking population, the reverse is true
  3. More women leads to more sexual competition between women, and therefore looser sexual norms. Fewer women leads to stricter sexual norms by the same mechanism

1 is fairly uncontroversial, 2 is a mathematical derivative of 1. The only part of contention is whether 3 is true, and if so, how strong the effect is.

There is definitely a correlation between the ratio of men to women at US colleges and its sexual culture. And the mechanism is pretty intuitive. This would also explain the current sex-negative turn among young people. There are fewer 21 year-old zoomettes than there are 23 year-old zoomer boys, and so with the 'upper hand', the young ladies are turning the sexual culture towards their preferences.

The greatest weakness in the hypothesis is that it predicts that a higher male:female ratio should increase commitment (marriages, having children, buying houses together) and all those things are declining. Of course, its possible that atomisation caused by smartphones is simply too strong of an effect and swamps the influence of sex ratios. Peter Foreshaw Brooks points this out in his review of her article.

If Aria is right, then we're soon in line for a marriage boom. Watch this space, folks!

Wealth inequality and declining marriage means there are far more Peter Pan boys who are older. And in my experience most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50 especially since men are aging slower than ever due to fitness culture etc. Wealth inequality my gut says is increasing available male to female ratios far more than population pyramids.

I would still argue that less sex is more due to fewer relationships + lower social skills.

most 20 something girls don’t have major issues dating as high as 50

Citation needed.

The average married couple in the US are two years apart, and that gap has been narrowing for decades with no sign of going back.

Is there a difference between dating and marriage?

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.

My best guess is this has something to do with who gets married today. Probably some kind of k-shaped market. Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious.

Maybe the dating and marriage markets are different.

Either that or Miami is super skewed.

Most attractive 24 year old women in Miami aren’t dating fifty year old men, or close to it. There is a larger sugar baby / p4p scene in Miami than any other major city in the US adjusted for the population, but it’s still quite limited. I think it’s more likely the circles you’re in. I know a few women with much older parters, but they tend to be average looking women who get out of a long relationship at, say, 32, don’t like the prospects their age, and settle for a much older man with kids already who funds a nice and relaxing rest of their life. A hot 24 year old, in general, knows that a silver fox today is the man whose ass you’re wiping in twenty years, when you’re still in your forties.

I think it’s more of a big city thing. Celebrities seems to have large age gaps even when they both have money.

The economy and a lot of social games feel very k-shaped to me now which would surprise me that age-gaps are shrinking. Along with a huge lack of social skills in younger generations. My gut would still guess a religious reason if it’s shrinking.

Yeah. They are more likely to get with an early 30s already prettt successful guy

I would guess 8-10 is ideal now. It takes a lot longer for male financial security today. The last friend I went to I believe was 38 to 30 and both have similar parental social class (midwestern SMB owner to Doctor parents).

Amish-Mormon-Orthodox Jew have high early marriage rates along with other religious

Ultraconservative religion tends to push average age at marriage down for men as well as women, because 'no premarital sex' is a heck of a motivator for twenty-one year old young men.

Not to mention the older you get, you slowly age out of everything in general. A lot of the things I used to be obsessed with as a teenager and young adult just no longer have the appeal they used to, for me. I still have a good amount of kick left in me and the range of things I spend my time on anymore has narrowed considerably. The girl I’m currently seeing I used to be something of a mentor to when she was younger and I tutored her in science class in school. Our peer groups were proximate to each other and although she’s younger than me, she isn’t that much younger. The only issue is she’s unsure if she wants children, and that’s the ultimate deciding factor for me.

Marry her and she'll decide she wants a baby.

What makes you confident? She is really into me and we’ve known each other since we were kids.

Yeah I know a few friends in their early-mid thirties who tried the 'get married and she'll flip on it' where No turned into 'maybe I guess' but somehow never turned into actually trying to have a child.

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes.

I'm a vibes enjoyer too, but surely in this case the data is straightforward and accurate whereas your anecdotes are just your own personal bubble.

I like the Bezos quote when it applies to messy data with lots of confounders, especially when the data is polluted by political bias.

I don't think that's the case here. One shouldn't just pop this quote out anytime you are surprised by data that conflicts with your priors. What possible reason would there be for this data to be incorrect?

especially when the data is polluted by political bias.

I think this is the key issue. When any research comes out from an institution which has been captured by the Left; and that research happens to support the Leftist narrative; and it contradicts my general observations and experience, I tend to go with my own observations and experience.

As far as age gap marriages go, my general observation is that as far back as I remember, they've always been pretty unusual. And they still seem pretty unusual. I'm talking about large age gaps, like 10 or 20+ years.

As far as same age marriages go, the data here seems to say that in the last 50 years, the average gap has gone from 3 years to 2.2 years. That's not really enough to be very noticeable.

At the same time, in my general experience, most women in their 20s are open to dating men 10, 20, or even 30 years old, provided that the man is otherwise attractive to them (which is kind of a big "if").

Anyway, my instinct is that recent technological changes (social media; easy availability of pornography; smartphone dating apps etc.) are the main drivers behind any recent changes in dating and mating patterns.

Despite disagreeing with poster above, I think in this case data is missing a fairly straightforward element: Dating preferences are highly localized, Aggregate statistics is highly not. The locality has a lot to do with local culture, local norms, local socio-economic factors, and local attractiveness. The problem cuts both way. Opt-out is making sweeping generalizations projected from his hyperlocal data but the reverse is also true, people making sweeping generalizations from aggregate statistics towards highly specialized local regions.

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes. I don’t know anyone in same-age relationships. My date today I have 20 years on.

Sure but that goes for the reverse. I'm a couple states north of you and I know about 14 long term relationships/marriages with a 1-2 year age gap and only 1 with a 10 year age gap. But I'm in my mid 30s for context and I'm guessing you are over 40, unless...

I think it'd be a Miami thing where Miami is essentially the PVP meat market realm

When the anecdotes and the data disagree usually trust the anecdotes

I mean, how much data are you willing to disregard? We have numbers for almost all countries. The country with the highest age gap is Eritrea at 8.5 years. But outside of the Muslim world and Subsaharan Africa, age gaps are small, and nowhere comes close to 20-30 years. And they're not driven by religious sects who marry young. The average age of marriage in all western countries (even those without any Amish, Haredim or Mormons) is around 30 or higher.

The most parsimonious explanation is that you, an old man who dates young women, hang out with other old men who do the same.

When Jeff Bezos was talking about data and anecdotes disagreeing, he was cautioning against measuring the wrong thing. He wasn't instructing people to ignore all data in favour of generalising their own unusual circumstances to the entire country/world.

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